New Hire Checklist

Nudging Doctors In Intensive Care Unit Reduces Deaths

Posted on: Wednesday, 22 June 2011, 22:23 CDT

Physicians for critically ill need 'copilots' to remind them of important details

Caring for patients in a medical intensive care unit in a hospital and flying a 747 are complicated tasks that require tracking thousands of important details, some of which could get overlooked. That's why the pilot has a checklist and a copilot to make sure nothing slips by.

A new Northwestern Medicine study shows the attending physician in the intensive care unit could use a copilot, too. The mortality rate plummeted 50 percent when the attending physician in the intensive care unit had a checklist – a fairly new concept in medicine -- and a trusted person prompting him to address issues on the checklist if they were being overlooked. Simply using a checklist alone did not produce an improvement in mortality.

"Attending physicians are good at thinking about big picture issues like respiratory failure or whatever diagnosis brought a patient to the intensive care unit, but some important details are overlooked because it's impossible for one person to remember and deal with all those details," said Curtis Weiss, M.D., the lead investigator and a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Weiss conducted the study in the medical intensive care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The study was published online in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and will appear in an upcoming print issue.

"We showed the checklist itself is just a sheet of paper," Weiss said. "It's how doctors interact with it and best implement it that makes it most effective. That's how we came up with prompting."

A checklist is a useful tool only if a physician gets continual reminders to use it to promote decision making, Weiss said, "rather than just being a piece of paper that gets shoved in someone's face like busy work."

For the study, Weiss and colleagues developed a checklist to be used by physicians in the medical intensive care unit. The checklist focused on important issues the researchers believed were being overlooked by physicians during daily rounds.

The checklist included six important parameters often overlooked such as testing whether a patient can be taken off a ventilator and the duration of empiric antibiotics (for suspected but not confirmed infections) and central venous catheters.

Creating Your New Hire Checklist in HR Software | Human Resources

The hiring process can be quite overwhelming at times: reviewing applications and resumes, scheduling and sitting in on multiple interviews and then making that final selection of the best candidate for the position.

Once you’ve made your selection, a whole new process begins which includes its own long list of items that need to be completed. The list can include all, or many of, the items listed below:

Employment offer letter to your preferred candidate for the position. This should provide a description, or at least the title, of the position being offered, the wage and benefits being offered, the type of position (salaried full time, hourly part time, temporary full time, etc.) and a desired start date for the position. Setting reminders for future dates: benefit application submission, first performance review, etc.

It can be very helpful to create a new hire checklist of all these items, just to make sure that none of them are overlooked in the process. Many small businesses are now using human resource software to help streamline this process and provide a database of employee information that is much easier to access than the standard paper filing system.

With HR software, the person handling the hiring process can automate much of the process and have many of the standard hiring forms print out to create the orientation packet. Many of the HR software packages also provide templates for form letters such as the offer letter and the rejection letters that need to go out.

After the new hire checklist is complete, all the information collected can be entered into the database and made easily accessible to those who need it and securely protected from those who do not need, or should not have, access to that sensitive information. Most HR software also provides reminders for those all important dates that may be weeks or months in the future.

Having HR software to assist you in creating and then following through on a new hire checklist can be like having a top notch human resource assistant working alongside you, keeping everything moving smoothly.

Atlas Business Solutions (ABS) produces Staff Files® HR software . It’s designed with small and mid-size business in mind and has an intuitive interface, so it’s easy to learn and use. It’s also very affordable. Staff Files has both a new hire checklist to help orientate new employees and a separation checklist to help the process of when employees leave your organization.

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